I’m sorry, but I just can’t see what’s so horrible about this statement that it got Sarah Dessen and a whole host of other big Name YA authors to flip their lid so hard:
During her junior year, Brooke Nelson said she fought hard against a Sarah Dessen book being selected.
“She’s fine for teen girls,” the 2017 Northern graduate said. “But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”
Sarah Dessen, who apparantly has a google search alert for herself set up, reacted as follows (the tweet has of course been deleted since):
Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.
Which, you know, I understand. It is hard to see somebody dismiss your work as not college worthy so casually and if that makes you feel bad, you’re free to gripe about it to your friends. But she didn’t. She posted it on her twitter, taken out of context, for a quarter million or so followers. And then other YA authors with equally large followings did the same, some in the name of feminism. Because if something is feminist, it’s gangin up on a college student when you’re a bunch of succesful authors with a large, somewhat fanantical fanbase.
It was an old fashioned form of fisking that all those people , including N. K. Jemisin, which was …disappointing… engaged in. That first sentence “she’s fine for teen girls” was dissected as meaning that Brooke Nelson was dimsissive of teen girls, was unfairly biased to Dessen, a self hating woamn, etc. Insecurity and genuine concern about the place of YA fiction in wider literature led to take after take suggesting she was guilty of rampant misogeny and personally resposnible for all gender inequality everywhere. Earnest explainations of how teenage girls are always dismissed and not taken seriously were used as a cudgel to attack her with and nobody saw the irony of a group of mostly rich, mostly middle aged authors going after a college student for something she was involved with three years ago and had three sentences in a local paper talking about it?
Stop doing this. Stop overreacting to critics or readers disliking your work, stop ego surfing if you can’t handle negative reactions to your work. Stop pretending that somebody disliking you is an attack on all YA authors.
Grow up.
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